To A Vanquished Firefly
by perrilloux.bf68
Summary: It started with a boy... [Completed]


**To a Vanquished Firefly**

* * *

><p>The scene opens and he just stares at her, the boy with the stiff officer's hat, the baggy brown jacket and coal-black eyes, empty, damp and dead black eyes. They glowed eerily in the soft orange light emerging from the souls of one hundred vanquished fireflies. He stares at her, blinks and then speaks. Without moving his lips, he says softly, "September 21, 1945… that was the night I died."<p>

The shot cuts to a train station and a family. A mother and a small child walk through the concrete jungle choked from stomach to jaw with tiled columns, rushing trains, wandering travelers and the dirt smeared bodies of listless children. They rest like vanquished fireflies on the floor staring at nothing, seeing nothing. Of course, the small child comments. The well-meaning mother, the busy mother, the calloused mother tugs him sharply away scolding as she goes, tisking as she goes, ignoring, avoiding, judging, hating, pitying, abandoning as she goes ignorant of the boy hidden behind the column in the middle.

He has heard the whistle of his last train, the last annoyed mutter of a not so well-meaning business man, the last lonely rattle of the breath drifting away from between his lips. His head is hung low, the boy. It dangles from a neck slender enough to see the tower like ridges of his spine peek out through his skin. The dirt packed into each knitted crevasse of this weathered torn canvas makes each bulging knuckle starkly deeper, richly striking as the filth travels from his face to his neck to his clothes. Those now consist of nothing but a white tank top and slate grey slacks. His shoes are gone and so is the cap, the officer's hat his father once gave him, the father he lost to the war. He might have lost it too, the cap, sold it more likely. But that doesn't matter now. The boy could no longer feel the weight of it, couldn't tilt the brim if he wanted too, see the memories tied around its tattered fabric. He couldn't see anything anymore, though his eyes lay open. Unblinking, unmoving, they just stared at everything and nothing. He moves only vaguely as his chest rises and falls slowly, steadily, up, down, up, down and then stops. The sliver of light, the last reflection of the slick, flittering gleam of the train fades as it passes. It takes with it the last breath of the boy's life, leaving his gaze to stare at nothing. It was finally empty, fully alone, tossed aside like rubbish in the dark, a vanquished firefly.

This is what she saw when she entered the station: a tiled column, a loading dock empty of everything except for her and the boy. The other children, just as emaciated, shriveled and lost, vanish in the darkness as well as the rushing crowd leaving them alone in heavy silence. And while a stark spotlight basks its sharp gaze upon them, she stares and waits recalling effortlessly what happens next. She watches it happen.

An officer arrives, a janitor, or a security guard, exactly what she doesn't know. He along with another uniformed co-worker casually walk around the frozen woman. She's dressed in a black jacket, a white shirt and dark blue jeans. Faded string corded hair and glasses clothe her in a different time, a time they would never see. They don't blink, or take a double look. The two officers ignore her as they walk pass her letting the handle of a broom slice through the space where her fist should have been. It went right through it and she felt nothing, reacted to nothing. It was nothing to her but a wisp of stale grey air.

Officer one, a man with a soft voice, nudges the handle of the broom against one of the boy's legs, the one who has just died, the boy whose corpse moments before had teetered and tilted and fallen. He was decaying now. Slowly, steadily, surely, fly infested pupils stare pass the officer while bone thick fingers clutch desperately a crimson square to his chest. They guarded it, kept it, secured it. Yet, the child's hand wasn't big enough to obscure the small object. The officer sighs though he doesn't turn around. She will never see his face.

"This one's a goner too. You can see it in their eyes."

His co-worker goes as if to another child and vanishes like they had in the darkness. His voice is harder, less touched and more calloused. He shrugs off the first man's initial comment. Who cares if the kid has died? They all die in here one by one. They find another corpse every day. Officer two sneers. She can feel it though she doesn't see it, move to follow his movements. She just watches the first officer as he picks up the little tin can, shakes it and then turns to walk away. He leaves the broom, the pail he'd also brought and the body. The broom and pail disappears. The boy stares. The woman grimaces.

She knows that in a few moments, the first officer will go to the station door and throw the can out into an empty field. She knows that upon landing to the ground, the lid will pop open spilling its contents into the yarn thick grass: two pieces of broken bone, the souls of one hundred vanquished fireflies, and the spirit of a little girl wrapped in blue poke-a-dots and a cloth dipper. She'll pick up the tin can, shake it once before staring at the place where the nameless boy had died. The little girl would attempt to run to him, to call his name, but will instead be stopped by a hand on her shoulder. The girl will turn and smile finding the spirit of the boy standing behind her, leading her to a train, a haunting lullaby, and a memory filled with the orange-like glow of one hundred vanquished fireflies.

She knew this intimately, the woman, knew their story and its characters. Most of the time, she'd go with them, the little girl and her brother. Together, they'd revisit their abandoned bomb shelter, their burned out home and their ill-fated stay with their distant aunt. Any other day, she'd walk with them on their lonely road scarred heavily by their tragic past and its tangled riddle of casting blame. But on this day something else had caught her attention. It stared at her and she stared back unperturbed by the unblinking gaze, those empty, black, and gloomy coal dead eyes.

The woman ambled forward and knelt taking in the body of the boy, the child left alone to rot. It was just them now. The officers didn't come back. The station dimmed and vanished. Everything was gone, except for a restaurant, a bookstore and two tiled columns, the child's and another waiting silently behind her. The darkness stayed as did the spotlight. It beamed sharply over their heads painting everything in its wake, casting them in soft slate greys and in marble stone whites. It made her squint and rub her eyes. The light, it felt a little too bright it seemed.

That was when she saw it, spied it again peeking out from beneath his stale frail eyelashes. A light, that thing that made her pause this time around, an image embedded in the dirt, in the thin-ridged skin, the black stone still gaze. The boy's face shifted making his hair drip long and dark, his skin to tare and bleed, his countenance to age five-ten-fifteen years older until another lay before her, a man she knew and loved. She blinked and the image vanished leaving before her nothing but the body of a vanquished firefly.

Her gaze darkened before movement caught her attention, the sound of cloth rippling in the dark. She turned and saw no one, heard the sound abruptly die. The silence choked the summer heat and robed it of its warmth until her breath clouded and the air bit down upon her fingers. She bit her lip, the woman, and tugged her jacket closer to her body. She draped its cloth-thin hood over her string corded hair until it covered her eyes. It was then when she saw him, felt him, his image invade that small little space in the back of her mind. The image was of a man cloaked in night staring up at something hanging before him. It was an image she had seen before, a devil with no hair, with no eyebrows and piercing blue eyes. Lucifer was cloaked in wafting black silk looking up and mocking a king on a cross—no, not just a king but a god—no, not just a god but in fact a dead god, the image of the man that had erupted from the face of a dead child.

Someone had painted that image of the devil just like someone had painted that image of the boy, pulled it out from history, memory, and personal expression. And instantly she wanted to join those ranks. She wanted to twist those images and combine them, meld them, mold them, make them her own. She wanted to focus not on the dying but on the dead, not on the devil but the god and not on his mortality, but on his immortality, the eternal wrapped beneath the clay-like paint of decay, emptiness and darkness, a light smothered beneath the stain of sin leaving nothing but a vanquished firefly. The desire ate at her, consumed her, blinded her. In the darkness, she pilfered a sketch pad from the dusty shelves of an antiquated bookstore. Two doors down, she found thin black grease pencils resting at the cash register of the small abandoned restaurant on the other side. Both businesses were empty, dead and dark like the boy resting against the column.

The woman stopped and stared.

Her heart quickened knowing that she'd last left the child lying on his side on the floor, staring not at her but at the space drifting somewhere behind her feet. She shuddered before taking a haunted look around, trying in the darkness to find a streak of unwanted movement, to hear the slight murmur of a vacant whisper, a swift footstep, the harsh clatter of wood and glass. That would have alerted her to the mirror, the one that was placed carefully within the half-starved fingers of the newly created corpse. She didn't hear it. She jumped when she saw it.

The woman bit her lip and then cautiously stepped forward taking in the mirror's dark ornate frame, the light that gleamed across the slick smooth surface. The glass was like charcoal, but it successfully fulfilled its fated purpose. As the woman found her place seated on the dirty tiled floor, against her own dirty tiled column, she could see herself. Her reflection stared back at her as she balanced the sketch pad on her up-bent knees and the pencil over its thick smooth white paper. It dipped and swayed, the pencil, danced silently as she drew.

Her reflection stared like the corpse stared. Empty, alone and dark, it fed the living woman a riddle which in turn ate and consumed her. It twisted the pencil, melded her hand to cress its slender arch and taint the page beneath it with dark colors until eventually an image emerged. Like light, it glowed from within its whitewashed pages. After a moment, she paused and stared, the woman. Then promptly, she scrunched her nose and killed its light. She tore off the page and tossed it aside. The sheet drifted as the penciled swayed producing another image which was later abandoned and crumpled and tossed away, joining the graves of its brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles and finally its—

A sound pulled her from her reprieve, a step tripping in the silence. The woman stopped drawing and looked around at the station bothered more by the darkness instead of the empty corpse, instead of the mirror filled with images of herself. Her unmet desire stood stark against the discouraging realities that littered the floor around her feet, imperfect, unimpressive, un-haunting. Arrested, they weren't what she had seen days, months, years ago trapped in the eyes of a dead child, a boy cursed to lose his mother to a fire bomb, his father to a submarine, and his sister to his pride and carelessness.

His image was potent as his story. The lessons that came with it memorialized people who actually lived and died, attested to by the child staring at her from above the circle of his mirror. It made her—

Grimace, the woman. Her reflection made her grimace, the one that now captured her age which was smeared like dirt across the woman's cheek. The mirror hid nothing. The sunken rings of her eyes, the thinness of her half-starved bone bulging hands, it didn't censor. Gripping between her fingers a rotten pencil with a broken tip, she leaned forward, the woman. She squinted half forgetting the sound of footsteps in the dark, of the voice that seemed to whisper into her ear. She could almost see the edge of her jacket in the glass. It now resembled that of the first Officer, the cloak of that laughing devil or the blue kimono of that distant aunt, the woman uncaring for the boy who would later watch his sister's body burn to ash accompanied together with the rising souls of one hundred vanquished fireflies.

Where the child saw nothing, the woman saw everything: sorrow, pity, indignation, hopelessness, shame, guilt and desire for change. Conviction and repentance, that is what that famous someone had reaped when he painted the image decaying like dust before her. He created a story which created a mirror. That mirror, in return, reflected light into the darkness revealing plainly the truth of the horrors hidden within it. He did this, that someone, that famous someone who was like others she'd also admired, who had done that same thing and was honored for it. They were remembered, like their work. How did they do it? What was their secret?

The woman pondered this. The woman stared meeting empty, dark, and haunted lonely eyes. The boy's gruesome coals hovered over a reflection that stared back at her. And that reflection pondered openly the reasons why her own slate grey pupils, which were once filled with light, had grown dim and darkened, why when they were once full of passion were now empty and without purpose. That purpose had died somewhere between portrait ten and twenty-five. It withered away like the blinking light of a vanquished firefly.

Perhaps, she would never know.

This was her thought as the woman's breath weakened, as her head hung deeper. Her neck, which had severely thinned throughout the years, whose skin now rippled loosely over its fragile vertebrae, now barely curled and folded. Her arms relaxed as she slouched against the column. They embraced with tired limbs the sketch pad held rigidly secure to a chest that barely moved. The pad was now empty. It was nothing more than a broken mirror. It reflected nothing and out of it nothing would emerge. It didn't matter now. She couldn't see it, feel it, imagine the light that once exuded out from between its pages. She sighed. Her pencil dropped to the floor and rolled away. It vanished into the pile of rotting paper as her breath faded, as her gaze dulled and stared openly becoming that which for years they had beheld: emptiness, darkness and death; a vanquished firefly.

This is what he found, stepped into, the cloaked figure. They were like statues, the boy and the woman, the mirror and the page. They reminded him of a story, of an image born out of darkness; a legend about a boy, and a book, an Indian and a dragon, a tower and a queen. In it was a gate and in that gate, there were two stone still felines with women's faces and eagles' wings staring at each other. They were trapped forever solving riddle after riddle unable to move and unable to look away. An Indian once stepped between them. An Indian once trembled between them fearful that doubt would cause their gaze to drip into his, seize him forever up into their puzzle of knowledge and acute understanding. He thought of that as he stepped out of the darkness and into the light, the light he provided and the darkness he allowed. There was no doubt in his gaze, no emptiness but wisdom.

He stopped before the woman and waited. When she didn't stir, he knelt untangling the hood from his face, the cloth from his hair until dark curls drifted like stale breath from beneath the damp inky fabric. Thin lips tightened and dark eyes considered, one blue and one green—no, two grey—no, two a deep color drained of their vividness in the stale white light. They were embedded like sapphires beneath a thick coarse brow knotted over a thick neat beard and stern stubborn chin. The man didn't smile, but reached out a hand. He caressed slate grey hair and soft paper thin skin that threatened to wither at the slightest touch. Undaunted, he removed her hood and leaned forward to kiss her cheek. He blinked once, twice, paused and then leaned steadily forward allowing those thin lips, that coarse beard, that warm damp breath to hover before the fragile curve of a white whethered ear. He spoke softly, the man in black. He commanded in a firm damp voice. He said, "Get up and walk."


End file.
